Day 3

Today was the main free day I had for this jam, I ended up putting a solid 9 hours. (2 hours of that fighting with making a UI). Because of this update might be a little long. I have to say learning state charts as prep has really helped me make progress with a minimum of bugs. Todays theme was focused on completing the gameplay "loop" and making sure things felt good. And visually it was a large jump as I added a character and tilemap to make sure the loop was going to work in a level.

For the gameplay loop I added a way to fail the key prompts, you fail if the wrong key is pressed, a timer with a visual count down to ad a bit of pressure and a scaling difficulty as you chain together catches. I also set up a basic tilemap to test catching things in a area with collision.

Visuals: Beyond a tilemap, I found a bug net to swing, a prototype character all animated. And the beginnings of a UI. I have some plans to add some visual polish towards the end of the game jam but this gives enough feedback to the player to better know what's happening. Though I'm sure there's much work to be done there still.

AI improvements: Added an additional state to failing to let the swam placeholder run from the player. 

Something I need to take better notes of is what I'm learning. I mentioned on day 1 I'm not experienced with Godot, so a lot of it is just learning the GUI and various API's as I encounter things. A really important thing I had missed till today was that if I had the node I could call any function on that node. That was how I was able to animate the swans fleeing from the character script. In my previous game dev attempts the code was really messy and buggy, that's why I took the time to learn the state charts library before hand. That has really paid off and let me focus on my game jam plan. Essentially the whole game is a series of state charts and signals, it's let me keep things decoupled and also a bit easier to reason about. I have also been trying to get into the habit of actually using the debugger to chase down issues. 

I learned a lot about the UI system in godot, I won't lie I still find it very frustrating. It's documentation and online answers are pretty rough. The current bugs I'm aware of are centered around the progress bar and the timer in catch events. 

Time spent: 4h, 5h = 9 total